Alethea Pittman wanted to be an FBI agent. She thought she was well qualified, having just received her law degree—exactly what the Bureau was looking for, according to its recruitment brochures. Diploma in hand, Pittman was ready to be sworn in and collect her badge.

I first spotted Pittman in a host of eager faces in her first-year class at the University of Alabama School of Law, when I was on campus recruiting applicants for the Bureau. I noticed her because she asked a lot of good questions. I kept in touch with her over the next three years when I visited the school, and I came to know her as a hardworking, diligent student of the law, clear-headed, sensible, and eloquent. She is also African-American.

I spent thirty years as an agent in the FBI, and I enjoyed it. I made arrests, did surveillance, handled swat operations and hostage rescues, worked undercover, and was immersed in Cold War intrigues, counterintelligence, and anti-terrorism. My last assignment had brought me to Alethea Pittman.

In 1994 I was chosen by Louis Freeh, the director of the FBI, as one of thirty-one agents nationwide to bring the next generation of agents into the Bureau. I became the chief recruiter for the state of Alabama, a job that lasted until my retirement, in 1999. I looked forward to the opportunity, but my enthusiasm turned to frustration as Freeh and his staff at headquarters refused to change policies that were hurting our recruitment of African-American women. Other recruiters shared my dismay. The Bureau began welcoming minorities and women in 1972, after the death of Director J. Edgar Hoover, who had opposed their hiring. In 1994 there were 7,405 white male agents, 1,053 white female agents, and 440 black male agents, but only seventy-nine black female agents.

Freeh had made greater diversity in the ranks one of his goals when he became director, in 1993, but he left the method of accomplishing this to the head of the applicant unit, who, though a veteran agent, had no experience in recruitment at the field level and who believed that candidates should acquire work experience before applying. Prior to 1994 the Bureau had been interested in hiring lawyers as soon as they finished law school. Indeed, that was my path to a badge. But the FBI had turned away from the law schools, telling new J.D.s to go practice law for a while and then come back, perhaps around age thirty.

Recruiters nationwide told the head of the applicant unit that his approach was costing the Bureau dearly in terms of bringing African-American women on board. He would not budge. The FBI could afford to be choosy, he said, and if applicants were sufficiently motivated to become agents, they would get the work experience and then apply. Thus the Bureau was losing out on perhaps the most talented and savvy pool of African-American women in the country. We were forfeiting the game without a fight.

In 1996 I met with Freeh to discuss hiring practices. I described Pittman to him, explaining that she had graduated from college with honors, earned a master's in public administration, and gone on to law school. I pointed out that she had been chosen by his Bureau, from thousands of applicants, to work for a summer as an honors intern at FBI headquarters. I stressed that we should hire her immediately after her graduation from law school.

We were in his office at headquarters, in Washington. Freeh listened and took notes. He bent over a yellow legal pad and wrote longhand in the fishhook style of left-handers. I said, "We're losing them—losing black women like Alethea Pittman if we don't hire them right out of law school, before they're snatched up by Wall Street firms and the best legal houses." He looked up at me and then returned to his pad.

"The FBI says it wants African-American women," I reminded Freeh. "We say we need them, but our actions don't bear that out. We exclude them. Whether we mean to or not, we do."

I stopped talking. Freeh put his pencil down and leaned back in the deep chair. "How would you fix it?" he asked after a moment. He studied me, waiting.

I told him again.

"But do we need more lawyers?" he asked. He was a lawyer. I was a lawyer. We eyed each other.

"No," I said. "But we do need the kinds of people who finish law school. They're survivors, intelligent, tenacious, energetic. Plus they have two skills the Bureau badly needs in its agents: they can speak well and write well."

Freeh thought this over. "What's wrong with making them practice law before they become agents?" he asked.

"Everything," I said. "African-American women who graduate from law school are in demand. Everyone wants them. The Bureau has to grab them early, when they're single and can relocate, when our starting salary [$45,000] is inviting, when the mystique of the FBI is still alluring. Not after they've proved their worth at a law firm and have fat bank accounts and children at the table. When their husbands have career obligations and can't be uprooted to move around the country."

Freeh nodded in agreement. He looked back down at his pad but did not write anything. He seemed deep in thought.

Someone knocked at the door. Freeh's secretary stuck her head in with a message. My time was up. I thanked him and left.

The FBI's recruiting policy did not change.

Since that meeting the Bureau has hired several thousand more agents, the vast majority of them white males, many from police departments and the military, the FBI's traditional breeding grounds. The Bureau doesn't have to spend a dime recruiting such men. They stay forever and make good agents, but they aren't the only resource available.

Throughout my tenure as a recruiting agent I wrote quarterly reports to headquarters urging a change in the hiring policy. I had one last opportunity to discuss it with Freeh, in December of 1998, nine months before I retired. He visited the Birmingham office and asked for comments. I again pointed out the Bureau's abysmal record in hiring black women. This seemed to be news to him. He wrote on his legal pad. I told him how we could correct the situation. He wrote some more.

Nothing changed.

Despite my recommendation, Alethea Pittman was not offered a job by the FBI after her graduation from law school, in 1999. Instead she worked for a while in the court system in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, and is now working toward an M.B.A. at the University of Alabama. She will flourish in any career she pursues. I told Pittman that I still wanted her to become an FBI agent, that she had the integrity and the ability to prosper in the Bureau. I apologized for its failure to hire her when she graduated from law school. I urged her to maintain her interest in becoming an agent, and I wished her well. She promised to consider a career in the FBI someday.

In 1999, when I retired, there were 8,183 white male agents, 1,652 white female agents, 544 black male agents, and only 118 black female agents. In that year, after the most extensive recruiting drive in Bureau history, not one African-American woman was hired.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

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But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Most of the big names in futurism are men. What does that mean for the direction we’re all headed?

In the future, everyone’s going to have a robot assistant. That’s the story, at least. And as part of that long-running narrative, Facebook just launched its virtual assistant. They’re calling it Moneypenny—the secretary from the James Bond Films. Which means the symbol of our march forward, once again, ends up being a nod back. In this case, Moneypenny is a send-up to an age when Bond’s womanizing was a symbol of manliness and many women were, no matter what they wanted to be doing, secretaries.

Why can’t people imagine a future without falling into the sexist past? Why does the road ahead keep leading us back to a place that looks like the Tomorrowland of the 1950s? Well, when it comes to Moneypenny, here’s a relevant datapoint: More than two thirds of Facebook employees are men. That’s a ratio reflected among another key group: futurists.

Even when they’re adopted, the children of the wealthy grow up to be just as well-off as their parents.

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What appears to matter—a lot—is environment, and that’s something that can be controlled. For example, one study out of Harvard found that moving poor families into better neighborhoods greatly increased the chances that children would escape poverty when they grew up.

While it’s well documentedthat the children of the wealthy tend to grow up to be wealthy, researchers are still at work on how and why that happens. Perhaps they grow up to be rich because they genetically inherit certain skills and preferences, such as a tendency to tuck away money into savings. Or perhaps it’s mostly because wealthier parents invest more in their children’s education and help them get well-paid jobs. Is it more nature, or more nurture?

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

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Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

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The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.